The three hard hat-wearing construction workers featured in the Columbus Crew’s logo always have seemed a bit incongruous. Ohio’s capital is a college town. It’s a government town. Forbes once named it the country’s top “up-and-coming tech city.”

The badge on the Crew’s distinctive yellow jerseys doesn’t really fit the region it’s supposed to represent. Now, there’s a question about whether the club itself has a place in Columbus.

Ironically, it’s a franchise that owes its existence to grass-roots support. More than 11,500 season-ticket deposits were placed back when MLS was courting potential markets in 1994. It was a surprising level of commitment impossible for league founders to ignore.

Seventeen years later, the Crew’s average crowd is the worst in MLS at 11,359 per game, despite the fact the club is in first place in the Eastern Conference. That attendance figure is down 22 percent from 2010 and a whopping 35 percent below this season’s league average. Columbus Crew Stadium is the only soccer-specific facility in MLS without a naming-rights deal, and the club is one of only five that lacks a jersey-front sponsor.

Last week, the Crew staged a lunchtime rally in downtown Columbus that marked the launch of its “Dare to be Massive” campaign. The name reflects the tongue-in-cheek slogan used by the club’s most hardcore fans and is designed to boost both corporate support and a lagging season-ticket base. MLS commissioner Don Garber—who has been asked far more frequently about the identity of future expansion teams than about the health of the current ones—was in attendance.

“Without doubt, there’s no MLS without Lamar Hunt and the Columbus Crew,” Garber said. “It’s time to get it back to be a real true leader.”

The buck stops with Crew president and general manager Mark McCullers. He admitted that the club had “a ways to go” to reach its season-ticket goal of 10,000.

“It’s a very attainable number. We just have to focus on it and get some people to really engage,” McCullers told Sporting News. “I think we’ll get this done, but failure is not an option. We haven’t set a deadline, but we just have to do it.

"Those three things (10,000 season tickets, stadium naming rights and a jersey sponsor) will put us at a break-even situation as a club and will provide financial stability. I don’t really want to think about the alternative.”

A significant chunk of MLS tradition could be at stake. U.S. national team legends Brian McBride and Brad Friedel played in Columbus, the site of the league’s first soccer-specific stadium and first dedicated training facility. The Crew is one of only five clubs that has won the MLS Cup, Supporters Shield and U.S. Open Cup.

There are several superficial explanations for the drop in attendance, including the stadium’s “dead zone” location on the fairgrounds a little more than 3 miles north of the Ohio Statehouse and coach Robert Warzycha’s offseason roster rebuild that led to the departure of 2008 league MVP Guillermo Barros Schelotto and veterans like Frankie Hejduk and Brian Carroll.

But the real issues run deeper.

“We saw a trend starting when we started (season-ticket) renewals last year around August, we started tracking behind year-to-date numbers fairly early. A lot of responses were financial,” McCullers said. “Our corporate season-ticket base has really fallen off. We’re about half the league average for comparable size markets.”

The economy certainly isn't as forgiving as it once was, but the lack of corporate support strikes at the heart of the matter—whether Columbus is a genuine major-league market. The Columbus metro area ranks 32nd in the U.S. in population and is the second smallest in MLS. But what really appears to be lacking isn’t major-league demographics but major-league ambition.

“The Buckeyes dominate the sports landscape. They dominate the media and they extract a significant amount of resources from a small market,” McCullers said. “If fans say we’re not marketing enough, it’s because we have a hard time getting a lot of attention because of the Buckeyes’ dominance. We spend just as much, or more, than most MLS teams in their markets.”

The goliath that is Ohio State athletics represents a challenge unique in MLS, and major professional teams in nearby Cleveland and Cincinnati compete for loyalty and dollars.

All of Columbus’ teams are feeling the pinch. The Crew have joined with the NHL’s Blue Jackets (27th out of 30 teams in 2010-11 attendance) and Class AAA baseball Clippers in a marketing alliance called “Game On Columbus!” designed to convince fans and local business leaders that the modern sports landscape requires more than college football.

“The city leaders very much want pro sports to succeed,” McCullers said. “They understand the economic impact, what it brings to quality of life, the national perception, how that brings talent to the business community. They get it.”

Soon the city’s companies and its sports fans must get it as well, or McCullers, owner Clark Hunt and the rest of the Crew might come face to face with the unimaginable. The club has claimed three major trophies in the past four years and has the league’s second-best regular-season record in that time. In Columbus, however, that’s not enough. “America’s hardest working team” has its work cut out.

It’s off to a good start. Only standing-room tickets remain for Saturday’s game vs. the L.A. Galaxy.